This is all about Mann's famous "hockey stick" graph of the climate of the past 1000 years. Science published a paper a couple of months ago by a mainstream climate researcher that raised questions about the uncertainties involved. The contrarians--including some extremists--have been on Mann about it for years. There has been at least one dustup over an irresponsibly published anti paper in a disreputable journal. GRL is quite reputable but not hard to get into. I've been considering yet again whether it's time to get into some of this. This paper this week is not the time, but I'm guessing the time should be soon. There's another contrarian angle on the ipcc case for human-induced warming coming up that might pair with this.

I was appraoched by a former colleague who is now the publisher of 'Natuur en Techniek,' a Dutch monthly magazine. They are publishing a 12-page take-out about a paper that will be published in GRL shortly, which attacks what is apparently a central graph in the Kyoto treaty, produced by climate researcher Michael Mann.

The GRL paper (written by two Canadian climate skeptics) and this Dutch magazine story all but accuse Mann of scientific misconduct, and they take some swipes at Nature as well.

The magazine seems to think they're onto something huge, and they're trying to get international attention. A Canadian newspaper has agreed to print their story, and the Wall Street Journal apparently is interested. (I have attached an English translation of it.) Dick: you're a much better judge than I am as to whether this is a interesting, or a big deal. So I'm just forwarding the story, which is embargoed for tomorrow -- do with it what you think is best.

Seperately, the Natuur en Techniek editor is asking whether Science is interested in somehow cooperating in the organization of a meeting about this topic later this year, organized with the Royal Dutch Meteorology Institute. They also wanted to know if I would chair part of it. Eliot, Dan: I assume we are not, but I thought I'd check. (I certainly am not going to chair a session about a topic I know little about.)

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Gavin Schmidt and Richard Alley made some comments on extreme weather here.

Dick Lindzen (via email) on cold and heat extremes:

"Gavin and Alley both seem pretty ignorant. Extremes of both cold and heat depend on advection by baroclinic eddies. This should get weaker in a warmer climate (assuming polar amplification which is another dicey matter). Alley is assuming that one just adds the change in global mean temperature to any current extreme. Marc shouldn’t be so defensive. He’s not dealing with experts. On the other hand, perhaps it should be noted that the reduction in extremes is ‘consistent’ with global warming."

Saturday, April 11, 2015

President Obama and I went to the global climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009. We ran into a solid wall of opposition from countries like China, India, and Brazil. The president and I literally had to crash a secret meeting between them to force real negotiations. We marched right by startled Chinese security officials. I had to duck under their outstretched arms. We got into the room--you should have seen the looks on the leaders' faces because they'd been dodging us all day and the president said wow, we've been looking for you. Persistence paid off..we did hammer out an agreement..

Friday, April 10, 2015

Randers, co-author of the seminal 1972 report "Limits to Growth," which highlighted the devastating impacts of economic and population growth on the Earth, argues that capitalism and democracy will continue to hamper climate action.

...And capitalism and democracy will remain strong for a very long time because people have trust in that system as it delivered impressive improvements in many people's quality of life over the past century, he said.

Note that "The Limits to Growth" was commissioned by the Club of Rome.

Thursday, April 09, 2015

Murthy said the issue was “personal” for him, since he once lost an uncle to a severe asthma attack. “We have more people exposed to triggers that can cause asthma attacks, and more asthma attacks mean more days of school missed. They mean more days of work missed. They mean more costly trips to the doctor,” Murthy said. “And they most importantly mean more scary moments for parents and for children.” In a background call with reporters ahead of the event, administration officials identified the elderly, children, minorities, the sick and low-income individuals as being at particularly high risk levels for injuries caused by extreme weather.

In his book “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century,” Parker surveys the broad impact that long, harsh winters and cool, wet summers have had on human populations across the globe. Parker uses firsthand accounts and scientific evidence to examine how changing weather patterns caused famines, wars and political upheaval during that time. The book won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and a medal in 2014 from the British Academy for “a landmark academic achievement … which has transformed understanding of a particular subject.”

Tuesday, April 07, 2015

Well, their paragraph on Climate Science is a rather astonishing take on the APS Workshop. Their paragraph on Climate Change seems to come from the Guardian. Their statement on Climate Action reiterates their rather crazy statement in 2007

Apart from the issue that no one on the POPA seems to understand any of these issues beyond a superficial level (after Koonins and Rossner departed from the POPA), and that their statements are naive and unprofessional, here is my real problem with this. This is an egregious misuse of the expertise of the APS. Their alleged understanding of issues like spectroscopy and fluid dynamics are not of any direct relevance to the issues they write about in this statement. The statement is an embarrassment to the APS.

...JC message to APS POPA: no one cares about your political preferences in the climate change debate. You have demonstrated that you bring nothing intellectually to the table (once Koonins and Rossner left). You simply have no business issuing a policy statement on climate change. You have embarrassed the APS membership.

Monday, April 06, 2015

3:20: "First of all there is man-made climate change ...it's a question of how much and is it good or bad..we don't understand the details. It's probably much less than is generally claimed. The most important thing is that there are huge non-climate effects of carbon dioxide which are overwhelmingly favorable which are not taken into account. To me that's the main issue--the Earth is actually growing greener..it's increasingly agricultural yields, it's increasing forests, it's increasing all kinds of growth... That's more important and more certain than the effects on climate.

5:20: CO2 is "enormously beneficial both to food production and also to biodiversity, preservation of species and everything else that's good. The remarkable thing is that these effects which have nothing to do with climate...are so much easier to measure than the effects on climate and so much more certain"

9:15: [On warmists] "There certainly is an enormous religion in which there are lots of true believers who think that climate change is evil and that we're going to run into big catastrophes if we don't do something drastic. That's a sort of belief system which exists...I don't understand it and I don't pretend to understand their motives."

11:00: "The real world is far more complicated than the models...I don't think any of these models can ever be predictive"

13:45 On sun's effect on climate: "The correlation is certainly there. Exactly how the activity of the sun influences the climate is not completely clear. Something to do with cosmic rays...probably an effect on clouds"

15:15 "CO2 is so beneficial in other ways, it would be crazy to try to reduce it"

16:40: "Average temperature of the Earth..is a very poorly defined thing anyway"

18:50: "Carbon dioxide will increase. We will continue to burn oil and coal; probably it does us good. The Earth will get greener as a result"

19:30: "[People from Asia] don't feel pessimistic at all...This sort of mood of doom and gloom...only is particularly in the academic communities, particularly in the western societies...The media have gone alone with it, but I think the general public has a lot more common sense."

20:20: Dyson brought along Lomborg's book "Cool It". Dyson says "I think it's the best general summary I've seen, in a way...I think he's very sound"

21:45: "Man-made climate change certainly is real..question is how much and whether it's good or bad...I would say it's on the whole good..it's not as large an effect as most people have imagined".

22:00: "I'm an optimist...Everything I look at has improved compared to the 1930s"

Please note that emails sent to government addresses may be subject to disclosure under FOIA and that you should have no expectation of privacy. If you want to contact me in a non-official capacity, please do so via my columbia email. (Replace the -at- with the @ sign).

Unfortunately, the statistics we use to understand global climate phenomena are telling a tragic tale, and we must find a way to change these trends. I believe that a large part of the solution to this process involves using mass production methodologies to roll out efficiency at a rapid and global scale. ... Jason Trager is CEO and co-founder of Persistent Efficiency, maker of the stick-on energy sensor. He is an energy scientist and sustainability engineer with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.

Sunday, April 05, 2015

We’re always told that revenue from emissions trading or a carbon tax will be used for energy and climate change adaptation purposes. But Inslee has let the mask slip and made obvious that it is a lie. Liberal politicians especially are drooling for a carbon tax as a new revenue source. It isn’t going to be rebated to taxpayers. It isn’t going to be used as a bargaining chip for a decent tax reform. It’s going to be used to pay for more government goodies.

Inslee isn’t the first to let the mask slip. In California, Jerry Brown is planning to use emissions trading funds to pay for his high-speed-rail-to-nowhere project, on the ludicrous grounds that high-speed rail will reduce emissions. (The opposite is likely the case.) No one should fall for the carbon tax trap.

The deeper reason he is pushing for tough new air-quality policies is to combat worsening health problems, like asthma in children, that are caused by pollution. “It’s not the flowers,” he said. “It’s kids’ lungs.” ... “You don’t even have to allude to climate change,” Mr. Inslee, a first-term Democrat, said in an interview. “One can support this simply on the fact that you want to support the education of your children.”

Saturday, April 04, 2015

Below is some background information on late 1990s hockey stick hype, the simultaneous elevation of newly-minted Ph.D. Michael Mann to IPCC lead author, the conversion of "many scientists" to believers, and the real-life temperature 1998 temperature spike.

My hypothesis is that the natural 1998 temperature spike was crucial in selling both scientists and the public on the validity of Mann's bogus hockey stick. If the exact same paper had been published after, say, an 18+ year hiatus, not nearly as many people would have been fooled.

Many scientists who had until then remained sceptical of climate change were convinced and the headlines and broadcasts meant that large swathes of the public were simultaneously concerned about the activities of the oil companies, the profligate use of coal and oil in developed countries, and the amount of carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere.

JC comments: Christy’s assessment, when combined with the UEA emails, provides substantial insight into how this hockey stick travesty occurred. My main unanswered question is: How did Michael Mann become a Lead Author on the TAR? He received his Ph.D. in 1998, and presumably he was nominated or selected before the ink was dry on his Ph.D. It is my suspicion that the U.S. did not nominate Mann (why would they nominate someone for this chapter without a Ph.D.?) Here is the only thing I can find on the U.S. nomination process [link]. Instead, I suspect that the IPCC Bureau selected Mann; it seems that someone (John Houghton?) was enamored of the hockey stick and wanted to see it featured prominently in the TAR. The actual selection of Lead Authors by the IPCC Bureau is indeed a mysterious process.

Note in Mann's book "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars", page 26, Mann suggests that skepticism was just fine in the early 1990s--you might say his advisor Barry Saltzman was skeptical, and Mann's "was closer to Barry's position than Hansen's or Schneider's.

"Warm periods like ours last only 10,000 years, but ours has already lasted 12,000. So if the rhythm is right, we are over-ready for a return of the ice,” Smith said in his comment on the January 18, 1977, ABC evening newscast.

He cited “experts like Reid Bryson” who based their worries on “cooler temperature readings in the Great Plains” and elsewhere and the “retreat of the heat-loving Armadillo from Nebraska to the southwest and to Mexico.” Bryson argued the return to an ice age had begun in 1945.

Why? Well, warm periods have occured in the past, and if not the medieval period, then probably the last interglacial (120,000 years ago), certainly the Pliocene (3 million years ago), without question the (Eocene 50 million years), and in particular the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago), and so on. Current theories of climate change do not rely on whether today’s temperatures are ‘unprecedented’. Instead they examine the physical causes of climate change and match up what we know about their physical effects and time history and see which of the multiple drivers or combination can best explain the observations. For the last few decades, that is quite clearly the rise in greenhouse gases, punctuated by the occasional volcano and mitigated slightly by the concomittant rise in particulate pollution.

Friday, April 03, 2015

It's a panel of warmists, but lots of interesting admissions are made, such as that evidence fitting the warmist narrative is over-emphasized.

At 7:00, Hulme says "there has been a pause for sure". He admits in the early 1990s, there was "an idea that [surface temperature would] rise in a linear way...maybe we didn't understand enough about natural cycles".

At 8:00, Hulme admits that in the mid-1990s, there was "a rather simplistic understanding" of global warming. "Models at that time did not have a rich enough understanding of how the oceans worked in order to point out that actually rhythms of the climate could produce pauses and hiatuses".

At 11:20, Czerski claims "scientists tend to be really happy, actually, when [reality] doesn't meet their models, because it means they're going to learn something. There tends to be a delight in it, rather than a disappointment."

At 11:30, Heap asks why Antarctic sea ice has grown, when 95% of the best 50 models had Antarctic sea ice *decreasing* over the last 30 years.

At 19:58, Mark Lynas says "if you're in the polar regions, you might be able to grow pineapples in 2080".

I was inspired by Tom Nelson to utilise Twitter a lot to express my climate views. I know Twitter is public, and anyone can see it. But this supension's a timely reminder that Twitter is also an organ of the establishment. They monitor and surveille, and will shut up free speech if their schemes such as global warming are threatened.

Tom Nelson is an important account for us climate sceptics and not having it damages Twitter's credibility as a platform for free speech, and for an open exchange of views.

Although in the scheme of things it will statistically be just be a blip for a company as large as Twitter if sceptics boycott en masse, it will be a blow to the Twitter brand.

I VERY much appreciate the idea of boycotting Twitter, but since I think that's Mann et al's dream, let's not do it.

Thursday, April 02, 2015

Although there is the possibility that the vessel was carrying too much cargo, the main theory “is that a large body of ice shattered the vessel’s hull, sinking it,” said a source. The Interfax news agency echoed those words, saying that “drifting ice in the chilly Pacific waters may have played a role.”

Take one step back and you see that birds are far more threatened by the combination of fossil fuels and climate change than they are by any other threat, including cats and wind turbines combined. Times a thousand.

A blog by Sir Richard Branson demanding a crackdown on global warming has been met with a barrage of criticism, including a rather blunt response from comedian Frankie Boyle. Branson called for urgent action over low levels of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, but critics said it was rich coming from an airline boss who was also investing heavily in space travel. Boyle replied on Twitter: "You own an airline you mad c**t."